Security and StabilityDespite all past evidence to the contrary, there was still a faint
residual glimmer of faith that Labour in office would instinctively favour
a progressive line on at least some law and order issues. That was, of
course, before Jack Straw, whilst still Shadow Home Secretary, began to
focus on street corner ‘squeegee kids’ as a legitimate target for the whole
weight of establishment wrath. Having then gone along with the Conservatives
in agreeing that Chief Constables should be empowered to authorise the
surveillance and bugging of suspects - rescued only, for once, by the Liberal
Democrats and the law lords - his subsequent performance in office is no
surprise. What is a surprise is the alarmingly reactionary instinctive
reaction of Tony Blair towards delinquents and young criminals in the face
of overwhelming evidence on the ineffectiveness of repressive policies.

The Labour Government has essentially continued down the Conservatives?
rightward and repressive path. The restriction of access to legal aid,
the abandonment of the right to jury trial in a wide range of cases, the
fruitless pursuit of World War II war criminals, the attack on privacy
- including CCTV in public places and the move towards internet surveillance
- the tacit acceptance of the wholly counter-productive witch-hunt of paedophiles,
the inhuman treatment of asylum seekers, the proposal to build up and retain
a bank of DNA samples from those suspected of offences, curfews, and the
abandonment of the principle of double jeopardy, make up a sad commentary
on a once radical party.

Of course, recorded crime rose faster over the last ten years of the
Tory Government than at any comparable period in history. We still have
the highest ever ratio of police to population and the highest ever crime
rate. It was arrogance of an astonishing order for the Conservatives to
claim that they were the party of law and order in the face of the clearest
evidence to the contrary. Despite manifest proof that draconian sentencing
and harsh penal regimes have neither a deterrent effect nor contribute
towards rehabilitation, the Conservatives persisted in pandering to public
opinion, which believes the opposite, by countering each new crime of the
moment by introducing even tougher penalties. Such blatant cynicism and
disregard for the obvious in the pursuit of power demeaned the reputation
of those who know better and debases a party that can rely on such effrontery.
Ann Widdecombe, with her “something of the night about him” speech dishing
of Michael Howard’s leadership chances, at least did the country a favour
by ending the career of the most opportunistic Home Secretary in a long
time.

The Big Issue, now sold weekly in many northern towns in addition to
London, is the most visible innovation able to prove that constructive
responses to homelessness have greater potential for success than repression
and exhortation. With its associated practical initiatives it illustrates
the Liberal belief that the voluntary sector is often the most fruitful
source of innovation.

The only effective deterrent to crime is the high likelihood of being
caught, a key aid to which is the active opposition of a neighbourhood
to anti-social behaviour. The awareness that the identity of the burglar
or thief or robber or worse is not only known but will always be willingly
supplied to the police ensures the impracticality, if not the immorality,
of crime. Traditionally most crime detection has been by the public and
an increasing fear of reprisal and retaliation is undermining public confidence
with disastrous consequences. Self-policing of the community by the community
is crucial. Not in a narrowly repressive or capricious way but through
a healthy and confident neighbourhood inspiring co-operative attitudes
and inhibiting exploitation and viciousness. Crime thrives in the atmosphere
of anonymity and fear that has been bred and planned into our communities
over the past thirty years of foolish and illiberal development policies
of both Labour and Conservative administrations in Whitehall and Town Hall.
The wanton demolition of close knit communities and their replacement by
often bizarre arrangements of houses, with a lack of communal facilities
or even of any obvious focal point, has enabled criminal elements to thrive.
It is important to commence policies for the longer term which will support
strong neighbourhoods with facilities for community activities and action.

If Conservative cynicism was deplorable, Labour’s blinkered reductionism
is almost as dangerous. Crime cannot be put down to social conditions quite
so simplistically as Labour would pretend. Of course they play a part,
as does the Thatcherite motto of having an eye to the main chance - and
its leader’s highly significant incantation that “there is no such thing
as society, only individuals and their families” - but to over-emphasise
social conditions denies both the element of individual culpability and
the need to maintain and enhance those neighbourhood linkages that are
vital for the promotion of the community’s highest aspirations.

Community
PoliticsBecause it has an awareness of the centrality of human values in politics,
and the role of the community in enhancing them, rather than being based
on an economic imperative, Liberalism has always understood the need to
assist rather than to retard the dynamism of the community. This view does
not require an idealised view of individual motivation, indeed, Liberalism
has the most rational view of the duality of human nature and of the competing
tendencies towards both altruism and selfishness within each of us. However,
even with the awareness that a local neighbourhood can all too often engender
wildly illiberal prejudices, Liberals see the collective spirit of the
community as providing the best guarantee of the promotion of the altruistic
element within us and of the inhibition of selfishness.

At its best the Liberal philosophy of Community Politics is much more
than a technique for winning local council seats and is a means of enabling
the community to take increasing responsibility for its own affairs. To
reverse the current trend towards a siege society in the face of increasing
lawlessness will require an immense commitment on the part of those who
care. In particular it requires a determination to identify with the community
by living within it and sharing its life. At the moment virtually everyone
who ‘serves’ those areas that have the worst social and physical conditions
commutes to them. The doctor, the social worker, the teacher, and the politician
usually live elsewhere, arrive first thing in the morning to tell everyone
how to live and then dash back to their leafy suburbs. Even the shopkeeper
and the church minister increasingly live away from their patch. The Community
Constable, who is vitally important to the security of an area, invariably
has far too big an area to cover to be able to have a sufficient personal
effect on it and also often commutes to it. The rapid turnover of Community
Constables is a further handicap: they need to be sufficiently long ‘in
post’ to build up confidence within the community. It is the immersion
in an area that comes from belonging to it by residence that is the key
factor.

The Inner
CityEven ‘good’ education has contributed to the disintegration of our
urban communities. Educational ‘success’ has very often provided the means
by which young people have been able to move away. Indeed the schools themselves
have all too often fostered such an image of achievement. Good examination
results have perforated society so that a handful of children can climb
through the holes, leaving behind a community bereft of many of its natural
leaders. An Economist article dating from the 1981 urban riots is
still highly relevant and should be read in full. Nick Harmon, himself
then a Brixton resident, wrote:

One common aspect of the riot areas is that all have suffered
for decades because politicians and their planning advisers have removed
from them their natural community leaders. Local councils have used central
government funds to buy up, often compulsorily, anyone with a financial
stake in the community - home-owners, shop-keepers, landlords, small businessmen
- to add their property to the council’s land bank pending comprehensive
redevelopment. Such individuals are the first to be offered the money and
favourable housing nominations to move out of the area, if only because
they are the most independent and mobile citizens. The effect has been
to break the economic and social ties which bind the community together,
ties which also help to police it.

It is these ‘ties’, he argues, which are far more significant than the
massive infrastructure investment which, he points out, has gone into these
areas. In the same article Harmon writes about the “unofficial network
of vigilance” of locally accepted figures of authority or “recognised people
‘occupying’ the street”. He goes on:

Without these people, policing is in effect an act of urban
colonialism and mass hooliganism requires a police invasion to suppress
it. It was this secondary control which. .. broke down in a number of cities.

Planning policies, financial assistance to underpin key services - preferably
by grant aid to voluntary bodies rather than direct council administration
- community transport, recognition of the vital importance of premises
run by the community, and democratic representative democracy at local
level, are all ingredients of a Liberal policy for a secure, aware and
relaxed society.

The Liberal society, and the Liberal community are no easy options.
They demand considerable commitment from all their citizens and great sacrifice
from their leaders. But there is no alternative. The choices are stark.
Either we continue down the miserable cul-de-sac of the siege society in
which every house and every flat has to be a fortress against the intruder,
and in which people turn inwards on themselves and cease to believe in
a future without anxiety. Or we have an outward looking community, confident
of its ability at best to deter those who might seek to undermine it or
at worst to know and identify those who break society’s vital code of personal
privacy and security.

The latest panacea is the closed circuit television camera watching
our every movement. There are already 150,000 and around a million elsewhere
in the country, and the Labour government has put £150 million into
their further provision by local authorities. We are regaled with newspaper
stories of how the existence of CCTV assisted the detection of a particular
crime. It is, of course, quite possible that a specific crime is resolved
thanks to CCTV, but at what price? There is no evidence that CCTV overall
contributes to the improvement of law and order, though there is support
for the logical view that it contributes to a displacement of criminal
activity to areas without surveillance cameras. The inevitable consequence
of dependence on this technique is the presence of surveillance cameras
everywhere. If followed, George Orwell’s nightmare would be only some twenty
years late. A new £1.9m camera system in Liverpool will enable “Police
and council officials to monitor almost every person and car leaving the
city centre”. To depend on CCTV is to deal with symptoms rather than
the disease itself, and deflects attention from positive policies.. There
is no ultimate solution to crime and to anti-social behaviour without tackling
its causes and without inhibiting it by community pressure and community
policing.

It needs to be stated clearly that, even if CCTV were shown to be highly
effective, Liberals would continue to oppose its presence root and branch.
The presence of surveillance cameras in public places is an unacceptable
and intolerable intrusion into the every day life of every citizen. The
potential for misuse is palpably clear to anyone who knows their way around
the internet - or indeed their way to video stores where tapes compiled
from CCTV are sold under the counter. And, even taking the pragmatic argument
at face value, the cameras are a miserable and counterproductive substitute
for genuine community involvement in the prevention and detection of crime.
The Liberal imperative is that “in all spheres it puts freedom first”;
in their active support for surveillance cameras in public places, the
Liberal Democrats demonstrate their distance from this essential Liberal
value. Not surprising in a book remarkably weak on civil liberties as a
whole, William Wallace advocated “the increased use of closed-circuit
television” in his 1997 election book Why Vote Liberal Democrat?
Why indeed.

The breakdown of law and order does not arrive on one single night on
each of our doorsteps fully-fledged in all its malign vigour. It creeps
up imperceptibly and incrementally. It begins with litter left in the streets
and then graffiti on shop walls. Next comes the mindless vandalism of the
smashed bus shelter windows and petty theft. If these become commonplace
it is but a short step to burglary and robbery. ‘Zero tolerance’ is a highly
plausible but deeply flawed slogan. It fails to differentiate between wilful
culpability and naïve mischief, and has no understanding of the need
for police discretion and judgement. It fills penal institutions with the
mad and the sad, as well as the bad, and gives the prison staff an impossible
task, which very quickly drifts from rehabilitation to containment. There
is no time left to dawdle on these matters. Every urban community, and
many rural communities, will already recognise how far down this spiral
they have slipped. The naïve and cynical mental straitjackets of Labour
and Conservative have failed. The future life of our cities depends on
the Liberal strategy of building upwards from the strong neighbourhood
and the confident community.